Angeline and After
by Yvi
Summary: The life and times of Mlle. Nini.
1. 1

­Angeline's father had never cared much for his daughter. For him, a daughter meant a weight around the neck that grew exponentially heavier every year, a weight that had to be supported and fed. It meant unnecessary frustration that he felt never should have been his to begin with. It meant a fiery-eyed whip of a child who always seemed to be underfoot and who glowered defiantly, refusing to make a sound, when he gave her the belt for it. It meant fading memories of a woman, black-haired and frail, who had never been able to stay silent under the lash. It meant a burden that needed to be transformed into an expedient. It meant a small wraithlike figure that was sent out each day with a little bread and the slurred words, "Don't come back home till night," uttered in such a way that belied the idle hope in the back of their speaker's mind that perhaps one day the wraith would not come back home.

For Angeline, home meant a filthy room at the end of a dank corridor. It meant stepping over the ashes and broken glass that littered the hall and praying the mice chattering in the corners wouldn't fling themselves at her skinny ankles. It meant curling up on a shredded pallet that smelled of urine and smoke and liquor. It meant forfeiting whatever coins she had managed to earn or steal during the day, which in turn meant more smoke and more liquor. It meant a disheveled form that always seemed to be half-hidden in the shadows that frequently reminded her she would soon be on her own in the world. It meant half-formed thoughts and sharp slaps and the making of a colorful vocabulary. It meant huddling outside the door with a ringing head and a roaring stomach, thinking that being alone in the world sounded quite appealing in comparison to the alternative. 

He had begun sending his daughter out the year after her mother died. Angeline was six years old at the time. Initially she had been frightened and disoriented, and the bit of bread she left home with had been snatched out of her hands by a pair of snaggle-toothed scarecrows that had been scarcely recognizable for the children they were. She had been lost many times, repeatedly coming very close to fulfilling her father's wish of never returning home. The city was a labyrinth of indistinguishable streets, and each one of them seemed to be slathered with mud as sticky as molasses and riddled with unseen ridges and craters that housed hundreds of malicious scarecrow-like beings. Angeline's education had begun.

She quickly learned to see the other street children as potential allies instead of monsters. They proved to be surprisingly valuable as far as navigation was concerned, and Angeline more than once exchanged her morning bread for directions. This trade eventually gained her the approval of a few urchins who accepted her willingly enough. By watching them she also discovered the merits of stealing, and immediately began to experiment. The streets, by then, began to feel more like home to her than did the dark room at the end of the hall. At seven, she was expert at combing the gutters for any items of value; at nine, she was a proficient pickpocket. 

One of her favorite occupations was wandering down the boulevard past the expensive dress shops and making off with the handbags of women enthralled by displays in the windows. Another was loitering outside the theaters and dancehalls and, more and more frequently, slipping inside them, where she amused herself by mimicking the dances she saw the actors and performers rehearsing. 

She would dance through the streets and the alleys, outside the shops, her feet winding around each other like ribbons and her arms tracing abstract designs in the air. Every now and then someone would toss her a coin, which she would pocket. And then, as time went by, she began to receive more. She continuously found herself with enough money to buy something to eat while still having more than enough left over to hand to her father. 

By the time she was ten, instead of dancing at random, she began to note the most profitable areas and then to frequent them more often. At first, she did her best to reproduce the polished movements of the dancers she observed, attempting to act ten years older than she was. It was no mean feat; Angeline was small for her age and far from polished. 

Within a month, she had produced a solution. Instead of attempting to emulate adult dancers, she used her diminutiveness to her advantage. She would wear her most ragged dress and tie an old ribbon in her hair and smile her saddest, bravest little-girl smile in the hope of appealing to the sympathy of the passerby. They continued to toss coins, but more and more frequently a pitying woman or a philanthropic gentleman would murmur endearments and give her a handful of change. When this happened, Angeline would open her eyes wide with wonder, bestow a few delighted smiles, and launch back into the dance with renewed satisfaction. Maturity and poise were admirable, but childlike appeal was lucrative. 

Occasionally one of her benefactors would ask her name and she would shyly give them an abridgement she had invented years ago. Charming little Lini, they called her, and kept handing her coins. 

Lini would shed her ribbon at the end of the day and rendezvous with a cluster of urchins to trade boasts, acquire dinner, and run through the city "mixing up" any neighborhoods that seemed too peaceful. Sometimes she would spend the evening on her own and go back to see the dancers in their halls, or use her earnings to go to the theater. Towards midnight, she would place a few coins beside the massive form slumped on the grimy floor of the room at the end of the hall, curl up on the pallet in the corner, and prepare to leave again the next morning. 


	2. 2

­She received the most profit from the areas that summoned the most diverse pedestrians, which was how she came to be attracted to the opium dens. Claiming a small space by the door for her own, she would accept money from the bleary-eyed patrons who found her incongruous presence amusing. By the time she was twelve, Lini prided herself on knowing the locations of even the most obscure dens. The only shortcoming about the places, she established, was the lack of young people near them, a fact that initially caused her to feel unpleasantly isolated from the youth-induced havoc she was accustomed to living in the midst of. The dens seemed to breed havoc reserved exclusively for adults and, dangerously intriguing as she found it, it still seemed slightly strange. 

One of the most popular dens frequently enlisted the aid of a pockmarked errand boy named Edouard who was slightly older than she was. Whenever Lini was able, she sought his company in order to alleviate the unnerving sensation of being separated from her own age group. Edouard was not particularly quick-witted, but he felt his seniority entitled him to a certain degree of pomposity. In reality, the only subject in which he was any more educated than Lini was that of the inner workings of the opium dens. The two of them would meet each other in the mornings before the busiest time of day and meander through the nearby streets together for close to half an hour before returning to the den. There, they would assume their respective guises; Lini would begin dancing and Edouard would go inside to await the day's orders.

"I've been going in those places since I was a kid," he said proudly one drizzly morning. 

"What're they like?" Lini asked.

"What, you mean you don't know?" he demanded incredulously.

She narrowed her eyes. "What if I don't?"

He laughed, still not replying. "I can't believe you've never been inside even one of 'em."

"I never said I'd never been in 'em, I asked what they were like."

"If you'd been in then you'd know, wouldn't you?" he countered smugly.

"Look, if you don't answer me I'll just think you're too stupid to even notice what they're like at all."

He snorted. "I'm not any stupider than you. You've been talking about how you've spent so much time around the places and now you're saying you've never even been inside one. 'Ts hard to believe you don't know anything, that's all." 

Lini glared at him, hating herself for appearing so naïve. "I know that other things I bet you—"

"Or maybe it's not so hard to believe," he interrupted, paying no attention to her. "It's awful grown up inside, so I guess you're better off staying out of 'em anyway."

"I'm as grown up as you are!" Lini retorted, angrily stabbing out the cigarette she had managed to acquire earlier in the day.

"You aren't," he said simply, his nasal voice infuriatingly calm. "You act like a kid to get money. How grown up's that?"

"Jackass. That doesn't mean I'm really a kid. It means I'm good at acting and I know how to get money. B'sides, I've had a lot of people tell me I'm real good at what I do, and I bet no one's ever told you anything like that." She jutted her chin at him pugnaciously. "I'd like to see if you're good at anything at all."

Without a word, Edouard turned a flip, landing with his hands pressed against the ground and his feet in the air, and proceeded to saunter up the alley in that position. 

Lini stared at him. She had often seen other children and street acrobats doing the same thing, but it was so unexpected coming from Edouard that she was unable disguise her astonishment. She could hear him whistling casually as if to prove just how simple the act was for him. Although she resented him for proving her wrong, she actually felt her jaw drop as he pivoted on one hand before making his way back over to her. 

Edouard righted himself with a flourish, taking in Lini's reaction before she had a chance to hide it. "Didn't see that coming, did you?" he asked sarcastically.

Quickly assuming a bored expression, Lini shrugged theatrically. "It wasn't too bad."

"Huh. I'd like to see you try it."

Lini had expected this reply and promptly gave her premeditated response. "You just want to see my pants."

Edouard waved a hand dismissively. "Nah, if I wanted that I'd go back inside—ladies show 'em all the time in there. Not that you'd know about that or anything. "

"Shut your head," Lini snapped automatically at the grinning face before her. "Come back here tomorrow," she added in a sudden burst of bravado. "I'll walk then." And she strode away with far more confidence than she actually felt.

************************************************************************

It was obvious that something needed to be done, and quickly. Rather than dancing at her usual locations, she spent the afternoon attempting handstands behind one of the rundown theaters, rationalizing that she could do without a day's earnings if it meant she would be able save face. Lini was nothing if not a fast learner. After several falls and a skinned elbow she resignedly decided was beneficial in that it would emphasize her pitiable appearance, she managed to take a few shaky steps on her hands. With a few hours' practice, her gait became smoother and her balance surer, although she still stumbled occasionally. Nevertheless, she reasoned, with even more time, she would be as impressive at the skill as Edouard was.

Apparently she was impressive enough for Edouard himself the next morning. When she carefully stood before him and noticed the surprised expression on his face, she felt so triumphant she even forgot to care whether he had been looking at her bloomers.

"See," she said in satisfaction, back on her feet. "Told you I'm not a kid."

Edouard floundered for a few moments. "Well you look like one," he finally said lamely.

"I already told you, even if I look little doesn't mean I really am," Lini explained impatiently, still reveling in the glory of her recent victory. "You," she added sharply, "look like a boiled pig, but that doesn't mean it's what you are." 

The argument that ensued was both inevitable and invigorating. Edouard had absorbed an enviable assortment of obscenities from his various workplaces, which Lini ably countered with her father's vibrant vocabulary. In the end, it all degenerated once more into the matter of Lini's childishness, or lack thereof. 

"Well," Edouard finally said, having exhausted his store of insults, "if you're not a kid, come inside."

By that point, Lini was terribly curious and wanted nothing better than to do just that. But once again, saving face was what mattered. "I get money out here," she stated primly.

"So? You can get it in there too. They'd let you dance, I'm sure."

"Maybe someday."

Edouard looked at her with a rare honesty in his eyes. "Listen," he said seriously, "you're getting too old to be acting like a kid. Pretty soon it's not gonna work anymore; you'll reach a certain age and it'll be over—you'll just get too old to make anything off it. You can't keep it up much longer, so why don't you start acting your age?" 

Taken aback by the candid remark, she hit him.

"See?" he crowed. "You even hit like a kid."

Lini scowled and stormed away with as much dignity as she could muster.

************************************************************************

As much as she hated to admit it, she knew Edouard was right and his words echoed in her mind. She had finally begun to grow taller, there was no hiding that, and the little-girl act she had come to rely on was growing less successful as time went by. Nor could she deny that the coins she counted at the end of the day were both smaller and fewer than before. At nearly thirteen, childish charm was difficult to attain and something had to be done. The dens probably would allow her to dance inside, after all, and maybe she was finally old enough to succeed on an adult level. The idea was encouraging, though she knew Edouard would never let her forget that he had told her so to begin with. So she stopped going to Edouard's den altogether, although not even that could make her forget his words. She never saw him again and never particularly cared, focusing instead on the options before her. 

On the morning she decided to take action, she put on a dress that fit her better than most. She abandoned her ribbons in a tangled heap on the floor, and left the room feeling like an entirely different person. And charming little Lini left her childlike appeal behind and finally stepped inside the opium dens.

It was no more difficult than she expected. She began much as she had before, by occupying a small area—in this case, a shadowy corner—and dancing. In spite of being the youngest person in any given den, she remained relatively at ease. From Edouard, she had gathered what to expect upon entering the places, and she absorbed the new atmosphere without flinching. There were other dancers: sultry, cackling forms that gyrated behind colorless curtains and dense ropes of smoke. They acknowledged her with sneers and sardonically raised eyebrows; it was obvious they found her presence more humorous than threatening. The patrons, with their heads wreathed in smoke and their eyes focused on faraway points only they could see, occasionally glanced her way; she suspected they saw her as little more than a permanent fixture, such as a lamp or a rug. But, once again, as her dancing improved, she earned more notice. She was ecstatic when she began receiving coins again, and was soon able to distinguish herself from the other dancers. 

Sometimes a patron or two would request certain dances of her and then pay her personally. Occasionally, whenever it was least expected, she would invert herself as Edouard had that one morning and bask in their reactions. They gave her coins for the dances and the handstands—she always earned more on those days—and sometimes she was taken aside and paid for other things, which she accepted as another necessity of making a living. And then, when she was fourteen, she decided to see what was so appealing about the opium itself. 

She had grown accustomed to living in the haze of the sweet-smelling smoke, but actually experiencing it for herself was an untrodden field. She felt pleasingly detached from the world, losing herself in the murky walls of smoke and the faraway movements of her own feet on the floor. Smoke and dancing became her world; little else mattered. Inevitably, as time went by, the former began to take priority over the latter.

She spent more and more nights in the dens, returning home only occasionally and seeing her father even less often. During those rare instances, he was furious at her for coming home with no money and repeatedly informed her, in great detail, exactly what would happen if she ever dared appear in his presence empty-handed. 

Lini never heeded his threats, having lived with them longer than she cared to think about. Instead, she simply stopped going home at all; the dens were home now. One night, having gone out walking near the tenement, she dazedly stepped into the room at the end of the hall and found it bare. When she asked, the concierge explained that her father had died weeks ago and various creditors had seized his possessions. Fifteen-year-old Lini, never having cared for him any more than he had for her, shrugged and nodded and went back to the dens to dance.

It was 1889. As Lini, alone in earnest and quite indifferent about it, watched time roll by on sluggish gray wings, a new dancehall opened nearby. She sporadically walked past it, stealing glances inside to watch the dancers as she had done so often before opium had become essential. The dancers there were like none she had ever seen before and the hall's popularity skyrocketed. Every now and then she idly considered joining in, but the smoke always called her back before she could walk inside. And yet, three years later, she did find herself inside, though she would never have expected it.

Until then, she stayed in the dens. She fed herself with whatever her customers gave her, but it was always the opium first, and she grew very thin and very ill and very poor. Frequently she would find herself sitting in the street without the faintest idea how she had come to be there. 

But one morning, shortly before dawn, she wove through a den where there happened to be an elderly man playing the violin. Haltingly, silvery wisps still escaping her lips, she began to dance, twirling through the shadows with a lurching grace until a man closed a hand over her forearm and stopped her. He was tall and thin and at least thirty years her senior. Lini had begun to snarl at him to take his hands off her when he held up a finger and said, "I know a place for you. Wouldn't you like to be a dancer in a hall instead of an opium den? You could, you know. You're good, I'm certain you'd learn fast, and I know a man who would take you if you proved you could. Come with me. Let me tell you how."

She never knew who he was and after that day she never saw him again. But a short time afterward, she stepped into the dancehall he had told her about. Night had not yet fallen and the place was relatively calm; she had planned the time of her arrival in advance, knowing full well how chaotic the place became after sunset. As the man had advised, she stepped up to the first person she saw and asked for Zidler and, as he had predicted, she was shuffled from person to person before brusquely being directed through a door. 

Zidler turned out to be large ruddy-faced man with shrewd eyes who misheard her name as Nini. When she corrected him, he replied with a wave of his hand that Nini suited her better anyway. Having all but forgotten her own name over the last few years, Lini deferred to him.

And that was how it began.


	3. 3

­The changes came quickly; she was whisked out of the dust and into the carousel, brushing the dirt from her clothes, swearing she knew the dances and the demands, promising she'd catch on quick. They gave her an old dress of Grille de Egout's and told her, all right. 

Her first skirt was red and, compared to the frilled and vibrant ones worn by the rest of the dancers, ragged. She thought it was beautiful. And she danced, small and dark, awkward in the first full skirts she had worn in years. The dancehall was a seething mass of the bright and riotous colors she eventually came to clothe herself in and it very nearly blinded her. During her first days there she was dazed and dizzy, drunk on the excitement and hardly believing her good fortune. The other dancers—or the Diamond Dogs, as they were known—indulged her wide-eyed awe for a short while, but it was soon made quite clear that unless Nini tugged her head out of the clouds she was sure to find herself on the streets within a week. 

At that, she quickly pulled herself back down to earth, where she fervently swore her feet, which were growing increasingly more nimble, would remain. And, for a time, they did. When she grew overly fond of absinthe, they stayed sprawled on the tough wood floor of her room along with the rest of her. When she could stand it no longer and ran back to the opium dens, they faithfully carried her there and back before the busiest part of the evening. When she encountered charges who proved troublesome, she often opened her eyes to the sight of her own feet, bare and bruised, bent before her on the cold stones of an alleyway. But Nini had long since grown accustomed to brutality—it was the opulence of the dancehall that was truly new to her. 

The intricacies of her new life differed remarkably from the lethargic laissez-faire environment of the opium dens. She soon discovered the dividing line between the common prostitute and the can-can dancer—the dancer had more than one means of making a living, and could therefore afford more standards and scruples than her lower-class counterpart. She came to this conclusion when one of the girls asked her disdainfully one day if she had known that no one from the hall would ever stoop so low as to even glance down the street Nini had chosen to explore last night. Nini had defensively tried to explain that she had been acquainted with the street for years and knew it well enough to be certain it yielded more profits than one might think, but the girl had turned on her heel and disappeared in a swirl of skirts. "Don't do it again," she had called over her shoulder, "else people're going to get the wrong idea about you."

Afterward, Nini had been more careful and turned to different methods of maximizing her income, still struggling to adapt. In the opium dens, no one had cared in the least how others perceived him. The entire area had been one gigantic blur, nothing quite coherent. The hall was different. Perceptions, it seemed, were everything, and the better one was perceived, the more likely one's chances were of gaining prestige. Nini had never before needed to concern herself with prestige, but she soon realized that an excellent way to acquire it was to produce talents and abilities that no one else possessed.

This discovery was made almost accidentally. Recalling how beneficial walking on her hands had been in the dens, she tried it again, hoping fervently no one would see it as degrading. Instead, they seemed shocked that Nini, new as she was to the business, had any sort of talent at all, and she caught quite a few of them eyeing her with envy. From then on, her place among the Diamond Dogs was secure. Zidler took a liking to her immediately, providing her with a nickname, large parts to play in any given evening's revelry, and seeing to it that she received a great deal of recognition. She was good for business, he told her, and laughingly claimed the acrobats should watch out for her. 

When the Argentinean had come, Nini had learned what he had been willing to

teach, adding a new dance to the list of skills that were exclusively hers. She drank in the glamour of her new position, spinning and shivering in the excitement it offered, feeding on cheers and music. She had a small room nearby and paid the rent herself. She finally felt she belonged somewhere and the dancehall, with its offers of salvation and the path to a better way of living through dance, was it. 

For a time, she loved it. Her unknown benefactor rested godlike on a pedestal in her mind. He had been, she thought, the kindest person she had ever known, and she longed to see him again to proudly prove she had followed his advice. But after years of dancing for her life in the hall, she developed a rather cynical turn of mind. The artificiality of her occupation nauseated her, from the laughter she forced out of her throat to the skirt she numbly tossed over her knees; it made her feel like the beribboned girl she had once been, pretending for all she was worth. She had managed to live within the mass of backstabbing and deceit and she had learned the importance of portraying herself properly, but she had begun to wonder just how much longer she would be able to last.

Her daydreams, which had previously consisted of herself parading her new life before her benefactor, gradually changed. They retained the hope that he would come back, only now, instead of gratefully flaunting her happiness, Nini saw herself dancing before him. She saw him reaching out an arm and holding up one finger, and she could almost hear him murmur, "Stop, you've had enough of this. Come, I know a place for you, a better place than this. You can't be a can-can dancer forever, you know, and besides, keeping up appearances is far more strenuous than it's worth and it never amounts to anything and once you can't dance anymore where will you go and what will you do? I know you don't know, so come with me." 

And his face, which was growing more and more indistinct with each memory, would shift until it became Edouard's. 

"Don't be an idiot, Lini," his reedy voice chided inside her head. "Pretty soon it's not gonna work anymore; you'll reach a certain age and it'll be over—you'll just get too old to make anything off it. What're you gonna do once you get too old? You're almost too old already."

She wondered then if she would have been better off wasting away in one of the dens instead of dancing frenetically with personal scruples and the perceptions of others balanced on her back. And she began to truly resent the man who had told her, "Come, I know a place for you," for making her what she had become. She found herself frequently thinking about the future and hated herself for it; she had never thought that way in the dens, never even assumed she would live long enough to need any long-term plans. 

But somehow she had survived, left with hazy memories, a blank desert of a future and, at twenty-four, a stubborn line alongside her mouth and a bitter squint to her eyes. She had virtually no idea what she wanted out of life, only that the idea of spending the rest of it in the hall made her stomach turn. She had seen what happened to dancers who chose that path; several of the costumers at the hall had once danced for a living. And there they remained, wrinkling within their high-necked dresses while they sat in the dry air away from the dance floor, stoically sewing with arthritic fingers and starving away on the small salaries they received for doing something Nini was certain none of them found particularly enjoyable. 

It was the way of dance, she thought bluntly, beautiful but brief, and after it was over there was precious little left to turn to. The thought steadily infiltrated her mind, creeping across the desert of her uncertainty until the dancehall sickened her more than the opium ever had. 

_What're you gonna do once you get too old?_

And when she ceased to see any meaning in the mechanically dystopian nights and she fell one evening trying to walk on her hands, she began to wish more than ever that he would come again and take her away. 

So she went back to the opium dens in the absurd hope that she would encounter him again. Take me back, she would tell him. I don't like this anymore and I want to go home. She never admitted to herself that she had no more home to go back to than she had future to look forward to, and instead she found herself returning to the dens more and more often, waiting for him to come again and offer another solution, a way out of the desert that still stretched before her. Every now and then she missed nights at the dancehall, but there was a new main attraction and, although she was scolded upon her return, Nini knew her own absence hardly mattered. And sometimes she would turn into fifteen-year-old Lini again, taking whatever came her way in order to pay for opium and possibly food, caring nothing for scruples or impressions. But nothing was quite the same.

Please, I don't like this anymore and I want to go…

Just take me somewhere else. There has to be another place for me, but I'll never find it myself. Take me somewhere else.


End file.
